1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a character display apparatus. More particularly, it relates to a Chinese language display apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
When Chinese words that make up a sentence are spoken, they are intonated in accordance with the meaning of the sentence. A sentence acquires a different meaning depending upon the manner of intonation of the Chinese characters in that sentence. In the tone system of Chinese, tones are classified into the so-called four-tone and neutral-tone, and each character consisting a sentence is provided with one of the tones. The four-tone and neutral-tone are indicated by symbols as described below.
Each of the four-tones are represented by. The first-tone is to intonate flatly and is represented by the symbol "--". The second-tone corresponds to the rising tone and is represented by the symbol "/". The third-tone corresponds to the rising and falling tone and is represented by the symbol " ". The fourth-tone corresponds to the falling tone and is represented by the symbol " ". The neutral-tone is to pronounce lightly the corresponding word and is represented by the symbol ".largecircle.". The relations between the tones and the symbols are summarized in FIG. 3.
When a Chinese sentence corresponding to an English sentence, e.g., "Please say it once more." is to be displayed on a display of an electronic translator, it would be very preferable for a learner if a tone symbol is also displayed in the vicinity of each of the characters consisting the sentence, as shown in FIG. 7.
In such a translator, in order to display a tone symbol in the vicinity of a corresponding character, it is necessary to know the positional relation between the character and the tone symbol in advance of displaying them. The measure described below can with this requirement. Namely, a memory region is allocated to character data, and another memory region is allocated to tone symbol data and positional information for correlating tone symbols with characters. Since the positional information for correlating tone symbols with characters must be memorized, this measure has various drawbacks that the amount of data to be stored is increased, that a memory means of a larger capacity is required, and that the control of the display is difficult.